This section is intended to provide a background or context. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Cells may be densely deployed in traffic hot spot/hot zones such as shopping center, large campus, sports stadium, etc. During an initial random access (RA) procedure a user equipment (UE) in such a densely deployed area is likely to find that signals from multiple cells are strong enough to camp on. The UE is expected to select a cell satisfying cell suitability criteria (such as an absolute or differential RSRP/RSRQ threshold for example) and starts a RA channel (RACH) procedure with the selected cell. However, this requirement does not consider the loading situation/status of the selected cell. Thus, an overloaded cell may be further burdened by UEs attempting to camp on the overloaded cell.
What is needed is a technique for idle UEs to select a cell to camp on that considers the loading situation/status of the cells in the area.